Everyone is off, but the big guy is still working.
“Baseball does such a poor job of marketing its sport,” WFAN legend Mike Francesa tweeted on Monday. “How can the Yanks and Mets be off on Labor Day? Utterly ridiculous!”
He’s right. Put aside the jokes about both local baseball teams stinking. How can there be a Labor Day (and a Memorial Day and a Fourth of July) when one or both of the baseball teams in New York City do not play? And yet it continually happens under Rob Manfred’s stewardship of Major League Baseball. It is a joke. Albeit one with a fix.
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As we wrote a few months ago: MLB should copy-cat English soccer’s FA Cup and establish a sprawling, multi-level knockout tournament. And the entire event should be built around the three in-season holidays.
We would have the Round of 64 — at which point every team would have entered the tiered field — on Memorial Day. The Round of Eight would be on the Fourth of July. And the Final Four would have been Sunday with the title game scheduled for Monday night. MLB would be printing money. And the entire thing would be far superior to the NBA’s dopey in-season tournament.
Anyway, it really is amazing how bad MLB is at everything. This is layup-level stuff. Imagine the NFL being gifted three in-season holidays and botching them constantly.
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James Kratch can be reached at james.kratch@xlmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @jameskratch.
